There was a story in the Post recently where it was very hard to tell if the Post was saying that Obama was a Muslim or saying that there was a rumor that he was a Muslim. The Editor, a guy named Hamilton (!), responded in a way that struck me as quite lame. There is not a single statement in the followup to the article that takes any ownership of what the Post did. You don’t really need to read the Post story to get it from the following, but Politico did a good job of following up. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1207/7193.html
The paper’s intention, Hamilton said, was “to write a story about the kind of rumors that are out there,” and added that “saying something is a rumor is not saying it’s true.”
“We didn’t say it was a false rumor,” Hamilton added. “To me, a rumor is not true.”
In the Post article, the madrassa story is described as “an early rumor,” rather than a “false report,” which is how CNN summed it up in Jan. 2007.
“I don’t mean to be immune to criticism,” Hamilton said. “Obviously we did something that we should have been careful about.”
However, he added, “Not every imperfect story generates this type of controversy.”
Accepting internal criticism, Hamilton said that the Post “is a big family, and families have lots of disagreements.”
“We’re not a hierarchical organization that promotes message discipline,” he added.
Each of these sentences is empty. And the premise – that simply to say something is a rumor is to say it is false – is surely weak. If this kind of thinking or explanation from an editor at one of the world’s biggest newspapers is not ingenuine, it is at least unforgiveably naïve. The guy sounds like a putz.
